this post was submitted on 14 Jan 2024
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It suffers the same problem every trading card game does: if you don't have the best cards, you lose. Skill and strategy and even luck are nothing compared to just having better cards.
IMO pay-to-win mechanics work really well for a game-within-a-game since rather than exploiting the player for money, they are exploiting the player character for effort, which can lead you to go on more epic quests
Personally I found it really annoying that halfway through the game when I decided to give gwent a go, i got absolutely trashed and was basically tole to go back to the beginning of the game and redo a bunch of areas I'd already spent too much time in.
Not to mention none of the gwent quests were epic in the slightest. They were literally "play these people, if you win you get a card".
I spent more time playing gwent then playing the Witcher.
That's a really superficial take. For instance in MTG every format has "must have" cards, like fetchlands or shock lands (or dual lands), but beyond that there's no "best" cards. There are "meta" cards that go into a specific meta deck and when you have one meta deck playing against another that's when skill and strategy come into play. And it's not like you must build a meta deck to play, you can build anti-meta decks or lab out a completely new meta deck. The problem is that such a level of deck building skills go way beyond what 99% of players are capable of doing. Even some of the best players in the world suck at deck building, because is an entirely different skillset to playing the game.
But it doesn't mean it doesn't happen. The modern meta looks very different to when I got into MTG 10+ years ago. Some are still around in some form, like regular Tron turned into mono-g tron and burn turned into boros burn. But the bans on Twin and Pod have killed those decks while Jund and Affinity have dropped out of the meta. In those place we have brand new decks like amulet titan or 5c Omnath. Somewhere in that timeframe we also got Eggs that was literally jank cards thrown into a pile of meta-defining solitaire playing, and then it got banned for being too boring.
You can get meta cards to build a meta deck but you can't explicitly buy "best" cards because a new combination of "bad" cards can create a meta deck and then those become the new "best" cards.
What happens when a person without any good meta cards plays a person who has good meta cards?
The one with the better cards wins.
The one with a better deck wins. If a homebrew deck goes against a meta deck then it's likely the meta deck wins, but if you homebrew a deck with meta cards vs homebrewing without meta cards it comes down to how well the deck is built. A homebrew with all the meta cards but without any game plan or poor mana source distribution is going to do worse than a homebrew without meta cards, but with a clear plan and cards that support that plan.
People not building their own decks and instead just copying meta decks is another discussion.